connected. So I did some checking.”
“I don't get it. Why didn't you just turn your suspicions over to the detective bureau?”
'That's just it. I did, but no one's taking me seriously, least of all Lawrence.”
“Well, you are sticking your nose into his territory when you-”
“God, I hate that kind of thinking.”
“What a ya mean? What kind of thinking?” he countered.
“We're going to let macho shit-head territorialism come before the truth?”
“It usually does.”
“With men, yes.”
He smiled. “You got me there. Something to do with the testosterone levels, I believe.”
Well spoken, well read, fast on his feet, she thought. “Will you just listen?” she suggested.
“Shoot, Doc.”
“I've found several suspiciously similar former cases, some of the information coming out of your dead file room down in the basement.”
“Well, from all appearances, a lot of cases wind up in that twilight zone.”
“One was the file I just gave back to you this morning.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Have you re shelved it yet?”
“No.”
“Good, then read it; see what you think. Then go back and check out the others I've read over the past few weeks. That's all I ask, Lucas.”
“The way I had to remind you to check that file in this morning?
How am I going to know which ones you've checked out before?”
“I checked 'em all back in, in order.”
“You mean you were just a little flustered this morning?” he teased. She managed a smile. “You might say that.”
“All right, so what if these cases are linked?
“What?” She gave him a confused stare.
“If they're in the Cold Room, they're like me.”
“Come again?”
“They're not likely to be of any great interest to Lawrence or anyone out ranking him.”
'They will now… or should.”
“Meaning?”
“Where've you been. Chief?” She realized now that he had no notion of the enormity of the Mootry case. “The Mootry case, the one that's been front page for the past week?”
“I don't read the newspapers. They depress me. Besides, I've been working my tail off night and day as a rookie, remember? Work detail by day, class work by night.”
“Couldn'tve been easy after the years of rehab you've gone through,” she replied, her tone consolatory, sincere.
“No one said it was going to be easy…”
'Tell me about the most important single event in your life, the accident,” she blurted out, her training as a psychiatrist getting the best of her, coloring her tone with condescension, making her immediately sorry, wishing she'd found a smoother transition into this touchy, obviously unhealed wound. “I know you want to talk about it to someone…” she said, trying to repair the damage done by the blatant nosiness that accompanied her profession.
“I'm going to make you work hard for this,” he said, his smile a curling snake.
“So I've noticed. Look, I'm sorry if I've overstepped my bounds. I must appear nosy, but in fact I'm… well, just…”
“Interested?”
She nodded, smiling. “Yes, interested.”
He shook his head like a big dog and then fixed his eyes on her. “I talk to the One God, the Great Spirit, about it.
That's enough.”
“Bullshit. Tell me about it; trust me, it'll only make you feel better.”
“Me? Feel better? Not ever going to happen in this life, Doctor. Maybe when the Great Spirit comes for me, but not on this plane ever again. Besides, I had a shrink on my case, along with six physical therapists.”
“Yours is a real success story. Surprised the movie people haven't sought you out for one of those-”
They did and I refused. It wasn't exactly Robert Zemeckis and DeNiro beating down my door to make the offer.”
He dropped his gaze, staring through the solid oak table, and he began to tell her the story in as brief a clip as possible, knowing that if he fed her this, maybe she'd see him as more than the cripple he'd become, and perhaps she'd better understand why he was here now, downing whiskey. She listened without interruption.
“My partner, Jackson, and I, we had just gone off duty. We had hoisted a few when we heard the radio call on a heist nearby. In fact, we believed it had to do with a case we'd been working for months, so we responded.” He explained that the car accident had happened while he was on what had begun as a rather routine call, since it appeared the gunman had abandoned the scene long before they'd arrived.
“So at this point it'd become a routine investigation of a robbery at a downtown liquor store in Dallas. The scene had actually been secured, cordoned off. It should've been routine. But it ended in a high-speed chase gone bad. Thanks to my now dead partner, who was a worthless drunk, a rotten wheel man, and the best cop that I've ever known.”
“He was your senior partner?”
“The best. Learned so much from Wallace Jackson, but the crazy bastard got himself killed and very nearly killed me with him.”
“Stonecoat, you aren't still angry at Jackson, are you?”
“Hell, yes… Hell, yes… All right, hell, no… whichever answer keeps me off your office couch.”
She gave a little shake of the head, her silver-blond hair caught in the breeze created by the wafting overhead fan.
“Anyway, Dallas PD was embarrassed to its shorts by a press corps that'd already been vilifying them on an 'inside' investigation of the 'excessive number' of high-speed chases in the Dallas area resulting in the deaths of civilians and officers.”
“I get the picture.” She drank from her fizzling Coca-Cola.
“So the force was sorry for the loss of their black detective-one of a handful-and neither were they crazy about the idea of returning their Indian back to active duty.”
“You realize, don't you, that Captain Lawrence can't look favorably on a detective who sues his own department?”
“I dropped the damned suit before it ever got to court.”
“You dealt it out, I hear. You walked away without a fight.”
“Let's put it this way, Doctor. I wasn't walking, period, at the time.”
“I only meant that they paid you off without a fight.”
“And I'm telling you, I fought from my hospital bed, on my back, like a goddamned overturned turtle. And trust me, I had a greater enemy to fight than with the Dallas Police Department.”
“You'd have won a much heftier settlement. You had a good case. Obviously, no one was looking after your interests. What about the Police Benevolent League, what about the Patrolman's Fund, what about-”
“I started an action against the force. Lawyers got involved and fees got too heavy and too many for me. Still payin' 'em each month, along with rent.”
“But you won?”
“Won the right to sit home and wait for a check, yeah. It took two years and a divorce for me to find a new situation while I lived on disability checks and TV dinners and beer. My so-called wife didn't even bother to come down to the hospital; said she'd had enough of life as a cop's wife. Meantime, the problem I was having with my
